It'l Be Yuge, The Bigest Ever, With More Viewers Than Anything Else in History

Eat your heart out, Obama.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has asked the Pentagon to plan a grand parade of the U.S. armed forces in Washington this year to celebrate military strength, officials said Tuesday.

The Washington Post, which was first to report the plan, said Trump wants an elaborate parade this year with soldiers marching and tanks rolling, but no date has been selected.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the request Tuesday evening. She said Trump wants the Pentagon to “explore a celebration” that will allow Americans to show appreciation for the military.

A Pentagon spokesman, Charlie Summers, said Pentagon officials are aware of the request and are “looking at options.”

Muscular military parades of the kind that are common in authoritarian countries like China and North Korea are not quintessentially American. The U.S. traditionally has not embraced showy displays of raw military power, such as North Korea’s parading of ballistic missiles as a claim of international prestige and influence.

U.S. military members commonly participate in parades on the Fourth of July and other holidays to mark appreciation and remembrance of military veterans, but these typically do not include gaudy displays of military hardware.

In her brief comment on Trump’s order to the Pentagon, Sanders did not elaborate on what sort of event he envisions...

My favorite military parades were back in Asuncion, Paraguay where I was stationed 1975-77. Alfredo "Big Al" Stroessner was in charge. There was at least one parade a month. Most of them went past the Embassy. Perhaps the Presidential Guard and couple of other units marched in step, but the rest was haphazard mainly because the band could neither keep time nor play in tune. The best part were the city garbage men with brooms, shovels and bags at the rear, cleaning up all the horse apples.

The same band appeared at our Bi-Centennial 4th of July celebration, led by the Embassy's head of USIA (U.S. Information Agency, now USIS Information Service). They played the U.S. and Paraguayan national anthems and a short Mozart symphony that all sounded more or less the same.